The many excellent reasons to upgrade your car’s stock headlamps include greater brightness, more natural color, and a significantly longer lifespan. However, there are a couple of different ways you can achieve that: with an HID headlight installation, or LED headlights.

When we examine the choice between LED vs HID headlights, it helps to understand all the different technologies that come into play. The decision primarily comes down to a handful of deciding factors, which depend on your priorities as car owner and driver.

Standard Halogen headlights

Despite marvelous improvements to lighting technology, the stock headlights for most cars continue to be halogen headlamps. That’s because these are by far the least expensive option for car manufacturers, being both cheap to produce and cheap to replace. That is, they’re cheap for a car dealer to replace — some model cars require special tools to replace the headlamps, and they might charge you an arm and a leg for it.

And halogen headlamps need to be replaced relatively frequently. Unlike the best HID headlights and LED options, halogen headlamps project light using very last-century technology: a thin tungsten filament burning inside a sealed in a bulb with a halogen gas to enhance its brightness. It’s a very fragile setup that will break multiple times during a car’s lifespan.

High Intensity Discharge (HID)

A huge step up from Halogen headlamps is an HID headlight installation. The term HID means High Intensity Discharge, which refers to the emission of bright light from a quartz bulb filled entirely with gas, no filament. The best HID headlights employ Xenon gas to produce the brightest headlamp option short of high beams, and a color tone the closest to natural sunlight.

From a pure performance standpoint, HID headlights provide San Diego drivers the best upgrade for your car, particularly when you work with best HID headlights brands (as we always do at Car Audio City).

Light Emitting Diode (LED)

However, in the decision to install LED vs HID headlights, there are a few advantages on the LED side too. Like HID, LED headlamps require no filament; they don’t even require a traditional bulb. LED headlamps are really a dense accumulation of Light Emitting Diodes. Diodes are essentially one way conductors of electricity, and an LED is one designed to respond to power traveling through it, by producing light.

This de facto light production makes it optimally efficient from an energy consumption standpoint. LED headlamps produce light for thousands of hours — 12 times longer than HID.

Despite the longevity, they produce beams up to 250-percent brighter than halogen lamps, while using 250-percent less energy. Another small benefit is that they work instantly, whereas HID bulbs require 5-10 seconds to warm up or cool down between uses.

LED vs HID Headlights

When you’re looking for LED or HID headlight installation in San Diego, contact us at Car Audio City, and we’ll find you the best HID headlights or LED headlights, and help you decide which work best for you.

Give us a call at (619) 474-8551 for more information about our LED & HID headlights.